Wired2Fire Velocity Ultima review

We've come to expect a 22in Full HD monitor with PCs costing over £700, so we were pleased to find a 24in monitor when we unpacked the Velocity Ultima from Wired2Fire. The fact that it connects to a Radeon HD 5670 graphics card is good news for gamers, as it scored 42.9fps in our Call of Duty 4 test. It's by no means the fastest card, though, and you may have to dial down the settings in more recent games to achieve playable frame rates.

Given the £628 price, it's no surprise to find a few compromises. One is the Phenom II X2 550. Wired2Fire claims that it can overclock it to 3.6GHz, up from the stock speed of 3.1GHz, for the cost of an extra cooling fan. This could increase performance by 10-15 per cent, but that's still doesn't bring the Ultima up to the level of similarly priced PCs with quad-core processors or the more powerful Intel Core i3 530.

With 4GB of RAM, it's still powerful enough to handle most applications, and applications that support GPU acceleration, such as the latest version of Photoshop, will be given a boost by the 5670. A 500GB hard disk means there's also plenty of space for photos and videos.

Of course, the corner cut on the CPU is only a good trade-off if the 24in display is a decent model. Unfortunately, image quality wasn't up to scratch. The image had a distinct blue cast to it, which is fine in Windows but makes photos and movies look cold and lifeless. We managed to improve things slightly by adjusting colour temperature in the extremely crude menu system, but quality was still below par.

Inside the Ultima's case there are plenty of free drive bays and SATA headers, but only two memory slots. This makes it awkward to add more RAM, as you'd have to bin the existing modules first. The sole free PCI slot is rather too close to the graphics card's fan for comfort, although there's also a free PCI-E x1 slot.

There's even less room for expansion externally; there are only six USB ports, and two of these are used by the budget Logitech mouse and keyboard. There aren't any FireWire, eSATA or USB3 ports either.

On paper, the Velocity Ultima looks like a bargain, but the disappointing screen prevents it winning an award. There's little point in buying it without the monitor for £511 - Palicomp's Core i3 Blast 530OC-22Plus costs £500 without a monitor yet has the same graphics card and hard disk but also a much faster Core i3 530 processor and plenty of room for expansion. It's clearly the better choice.